Key Insights

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1. Legal Ops as a Relationship Business.
Verma highlights that successful legal operations are built on trust and credibility rather than just technical skills. He suggests a "three-month learning rule" for new leaders to understand the business before making drastic behavior changes.
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2. The "Virtuous Cycle" of Savings.

Legal leaders should prove their value by finding "low-hanging fruit" in external spend. By reducing outside counsel fees (sometimes by up to 80% through in-housing), they can reinvest those savings into scaling internal technology and talent.

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3. The "Engine Room" Philosophy.

Every high-performing legal team needs an "engine room"—a dedicated operations function to manage processes, policies, and technology. This frees up lawyers to move from being "order takers" to "strategic business co-leaders".

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4. Quantitative Metrics are Non-Negotiable.

To build trust with the CFO, legal departments must move beyond qualitative descriptions to quantitative factual reporting. Verma stresses the importance of tracking legal spend over time versus revenue growth and benchmarking against industry peers.

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5. The Agnostic Future of Legal Tech.

Verma predicts that AI tools will eventually become department-agnostic. Rather than legal-specific tech, firms will use efficient, high-speed tools for research and drafting that allow legal to play on an even playing field with other modern business units.

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6. Closing Insight

Your role as GC is to ensure the company operaties with its "eyes wide open" to risk and cost. By shifting your focus from purely legal technicalities to operational maturity, you ensure that legal is a foundational through-line for the company rather than a transactional roadblock.